PatREST to Include OCLC Audience Level Data

I’ve updated AADL’s PatREST interface to reflect an addition I’ve made to the PatREST specification (now 1.3). This addition takes advantage of OCLC’s Audience Level indicator. OCLC makes this information available via an XML web service. From their service page:

There are a variety of ways to characterize library materials. The type of reader believed to be interested in a particular item is one. Such an indicator, generally known as the audience level, is potentially useful for a variety of activities, including the development of new ways to improve information relevance for retrieval, reference services (including readers advisory) and collection development. Audience-level filters could be implemented in existing retrieval systems to assist users in finding content based on their information needs.

This is not the first OCLC service PatREST has taken advantage of. PatREST has been incorporating data from OCLC’s xISBN service for quite some time. By pulling in the data they make available, the data PatREST is able to return becomes significantly more valuable.

Because AADL’s PatREST implementation relies heavily upon III’s XML server, I’ve added OCLC’s Audience Level functionality to the PHP XMLOPAC class code which is freely available from my files page or you can directly grab it right here.

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one is to give actual examples in the spec, and not just abstracted versions – that clarifies things sometimes. (e.g. when multiple isbns are returned, it’s not 100% clear that you just return multiple altisbn tags).

second is that if the level is a percentile then it should be scaled 0-100 not 0-1.

Ed, you’re right, I think some real-life examples would be a god idea. I’ll put some in when I get the chance.

I thought about converting the percentile to a pure percentage, but then I figured that, programmatically, coders would have to convert it back to a decimal value to do anything with it. What do you think?

[…] Mash-ups and Patron-oriented Development John Byberg Facilitating patrons to create their own library-based tools. Application Program Interface [API] allow for more involvement from the community and get them developing their own applications and moving library resources and services away from the library website. By using these tools, the library becomes more omnipresent, it gets integrated with user everyday life. John’s example is patREST. This morhed into a discussion of why this is valuable and how that can be represented to library decision makers. […]

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A father and a library geek.

I work at the Darien Library in Connecticut as the Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience.